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Friday, March 31, 2006

Mr. Stallman Gives Keynote on "The Future of Free Software".

Mr. Stallman again and again is reiterating his attempts to wage a war on concepts. On March 18, 2006, he gave a keynote speech at a meeting about the drafting of GPLv3, "The Future of Free Software" in Turino, Italy. And his speech has not only been recorded in

a video but has also been transcribed and then published on

Groklaw. At the time being I shall quote here only a small portion of his introduction:

"[...] There is a term that some people use, which causes terrible confusion and should never be used, and that is the term 'intellectual property'. Now, I heard someone mention that term. I don't think he was explaining why that term should not be used.

It is devastatingly harmful to use the term 'intellectual property' because that term implies the existence of something which does not exist.

Copyright law exists. Patent law exists. They have almost nothing in common in terms of the requirements that they put on the public. Trademark law also exists. It has nothing in common with copyright law or patent law about what it requires of the public. So, the idea that there is some general thing which these are instances of already gets people so confused that they cannot understand these issues. There is no such thing. These are three separate unrelated issues, and any attempt to generalise about them guarantees confusion. Everyone who uses the term 'intellectual property' is either confused himself or trying to confuse you.

[applause]

I came to this conclusion a few years ago and since then I have decided that I will never use that term. No exceptions. I will talk about why the term is confusing, because that's a useful thing to do, but I will never use that term. I never use it. I hope you will join me in making this firm policy of never using it. And if someone else says something about 'intellectual property', I will not respond directly to what he said without first explaining the confusion buried in it, because you see, the confusion buried in a statement is usually more harmful than whatever may be false that he actually tried to say.

The false premises, the false presuppositions are the most important problem. So, if someone makes a statement about intellectual property and some part of it is the specific point, which I might disagree with, the first thing I will say is why it's a mistake to talk about intellectual property at all, and then I will try to translate what he said into clearer terms, and then I might say if I agree with it or not. But that's secondary, and explaining to people the confusion in the term intellectual property itself is the most important thing to do.

There is a tendency to, we all have it, to follow other people in their choice of terminology. If someone says an outrageous thing and he uses the term intellectual property, you will feel drawn into responding in the same terms. So, learn to resist that temptation. [...]"

Come off it, Mr. Stallman. "Intellectual Property" does exist as long as there is something like "Intellectual Property Law". Of course, there are significant differences between Copyright, Patent, and Trade Mark Law. And there might well be reasonable doubts as to whether Trade Mark Law should be counted as Intellectual Property Law. Nobody would dare to deny that. But they have certain aspects in common. For example, they all relate to the law of the intangibles. It is a question of academic scholarship to decide on whether or not a term like "Intellectual Property Law" or "Private Law" or "Public Law" makes sense. It should not be misused for political warfare purposes.

It is clear, however, for what ultimative political objective Mr. Stallman tries to interfere with concepts well established since long for the classification of various areas of law: He wants to create semantic weapons to single out the Patent Law to be identified as the rotten apple of law while, at the same time, glorifying Copyright Law because of it appears to serve his aims. In Mr. Stallman' view, Copyright Law enables FSF to create and maintain something like the GNU GPL (which is, of course, a good thing because of he can try to leverage it to transform the world into a paradise of Knowledge Commons), whereas Patent Law is the basis of, in his view, ugly monopolies in particular but not only in the field of computer-related inventions.

Mr. Stallman is used to ignore the benefits of the Patent Law as well as the drawbacks of the Copyright system as we have it now. It appears to me as if he is not really interested in any academic truth-finding mission. He seems to be obsessed by his own political mission to transform the world on a large scale where he and his fellows have power to enforce a global Knowledge Commons, at the expense of more capitalistic market-oriented versions of a knowledge economy.

I do not at all put in question the merits Mr. Stallman had aquired by inventing the GPL many years ago as a novel business modell for creating, maintaining and distributing software. But universalising this particular approach up to the scale of a mandatory globalised knowledge economy entirely based on the Knowledge Commons guraded by GPLvX might do more harm than good.

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I think he even sees Copyright law as a neccessary temporary evil on the road to a world where everything is in some kind of public domain.

All this is, of course, pretty controversial even in the Open Source community in the broad sense of the term.

Personally, I think FLOSS is often a good choice that deserves to be promoted, but it should be exactly that: a choice.

# posted by raboof : 04 April, 2006 12:22

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Patent Attorney Axel H Horns' Blog on Intellectual Property Law.

Friday, March 31, 2006

Mr. Stallman Gives Keynote on "The Future of Free Software".

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